Anti-glare coatings, and anti-glare panels in general, are desirable in many applications including, portrait glass, privacy glass, and display screen manufacturing. Such optical coatings scatter specular reflections into a wide viewing cone to diffuse glare and reflection. It is difficult to achieve a substrate that simultaneously reduces gloss (i.e., specular reflection) and haze (i.e., diffuse transmittance) while relying on light scattering to obtain anti-glare properties.
Conventional methods of forming anti-glare panels include, for example, wet etching the surface of the substrate, using mechanical rollers with pre-defined textures on substrates to create a surface roughness, and applying thin, polymeric films with texture to the substrates using adhesives. Such methods are expensive, have low throughput (i.e., a low rate of manufacture), and lack of precise control with respect to surface texture, which results in a diffuse scattering coating with poor light transmittance or good light transmittance, but poor reduction of glare. Additionally, coatings formed using the polymeric films often demonstrate poor abrasion resistance and cohesive strength, resulting in the coatings (and/or the substrate itself) being damaged when various forces are experienced.